Reviews from various genres, read at the speed of light.

In An Absent Dream

"Katherine Lundy walked in the world. That was quite enough to set everything else into motion."

This is part of the Wayward Children series but is a prequel to well, everythingelseso far. Every Heart A Doorway is the only book that features this character in later life.

This one tells the story of (Katherine) Lundy and her portal world experience. Apparently it runs in the family that Lundy children can find doors to the Goblin Market, as her dad once used to go there--it's a world where you can enter and return around every 2 years-ish? until you turn 18 and have to choose to take Market citizenship or never return there again.

Young Katherine was a very mature child for about age six in 1964 when she first found the door and went through. In her world, her father was the principal of her school and thus she had no friends. In the Market, she made her first friend, a girl named Moon, and generally enjoyed herself. But she'd periodically decide to go back home, realize most of the time that her world sucked and has irritating gender rules they want to make her follow, and then leave again. Meanwhile back in the Market, her friend Moon seems to have a hard time following the rules, and Lundy (who's told not to go by her first name there, so either use a nickname or your family name, like her father before her) starts doing her best to help Moon out.

The Market is based on an overall sense of fairness, bartering, and giving "fair value." Almost everything is some kind of exchange or balance and the overall sentient force of the Market balances it all out. If say, Lundy falls asleep one night before doing her hour's worth of book organization that she does to pay rent for a place to sleep, she'll grow feathers out the back of her neck until she's done her duty. The more behind you fall in your debts, the more likely you are to go full on bird and have an even harder time giving fair value to dig yourself out of your cosmic debt hole. I can't say I think this world sounds appealing to me--though those that go there say you can be happy there--but mostly because it seems like you could screw yourself over very easily. But Lundy, well, thinks she can handle it. And mostly she does, until she feels like she owes her family one last visit home before she leaves forever before turning 18, and her little sister Diana will not let her go--er, emotionally. This leads to the depressing/shitty climax in which Lundy thinks she can make some kind of deal to postpone* her birthday, and it doesn't go well.

If you've read the first book in the series, I'm not spoiling anything to mention this.

"It can be easy, when hearing about someone else's adventures in a far-off, magical land, to say "I would never choose the mundane world over thee fantastical. I would run into rivers of rainbow as fast as my legs would carry me, and I would never once look back." It is so often easy, when one has the luxury of being sure a thing will never happen, to be equally sure of one's answers. Reality, it must sadly be said, has a way of complicating things, even things we might believe could never be that complicated."

Overall I liked this, particularly the style in which it was written, very "rueful fairy tale" and foreshadowing. I wouldn't want to live in Goblin Market either but it's an interesting system they've got going for themselves there. Very Logical. But there's two things that bothered me about it:

(a) I felt like we didn't get to hear much about the adventures Lundy had that affected her and made her choose to return to the regular world periodically. Whatever went on with Mockery in particular felt like something we needed to hear and could not because this series is designed to be short. That was frustrating.

(b) The ending was just a giant "grrr, argh, wtf?" moment. I knew it was coming and I still didn't feel like it quite worked. I was frustrated, but maybe that's the point.

Anyway...three and a half stars. I don't feel like I'm quite writing this so well, so go read this instead. Or this one. Or this one.